Author: Jeremy Rubin 2022-04-27 17:54:16
Published on: 2022-04-27T17:54:16+00:00
The Bitcoin-dev mailing list has been discussing the possibility of measuring user support for proposed soft-fork changes. This is due to the breakdown in civility around debates that inevitably devolve into people claiming their circles represent the set of Bitcoin users as a whole. The trauma of the block size wars has left people wary of implying miners have any influence over what rulesets get activated or don't. Currently, miner signaling is the only signal they have to work with, which is rightly frustrating to a lot of people. Thus, it was suggested that transactions themselves could signal for upgrades via the free bits in the version field of a transaction that are presently ignored. This would enable users to pressure miners to act on their behalf via sybil-resistant influence. This mechanism could be an auxiliary feature of the soft fork deployment scheme chosen and does not require trust in institutions that fork futures would. However, there are some anticipated objections, such as signaling isn't voting and no deployment should be made without consensus first. Additionally, this proposal could encourage "spam," but if you pay the fees, it's not spam. Therefore, the forum was asked whether a scheme like this affords us a better view into consensus than we have today? Can it be gamed to give us a worse view into consensus? Does it measure the right thing? And, should he write a BIP spec'ing this out in detail?
Updated on: 2023-06-15T19:43:38.549755+00:00